NEW DELHI: India’s AI Impact Summit 2026 is emerging as an early gauge of whether the country’s state-backed artificial intelligence (AI) startups can demonstrate meaningful progress in a rapidly shifting global AI landscape, as companies backed under the government’s India AI Mission prepare to showcase their models this week.
The summit opened to a stuttered start on Monday, with attendees reporting heavy crowds, overpacked meeting rooms and patchy organization on the ground, issues the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) is expected to smooth out over the rest of the week.
Daniel Otieno, a delegate from Kenya visiting as an AI literacy specialist for learning disabilities, said navigating the venue was one of the biggest challenges. “On top of that, the security personnel were not equipped well enough to understand global delegates, and guide them,” Otieno said, adding that there was confusion around timings and access to basic amenities such as water.
mission test
At the center of this showcase are 12 startups backed by MeitY’s ₹10,372 crore India AI Mission, a program launched in March 2024 to address what policymakers then saw as the biggest barrier to domestic AI development – the high cost of computing power required to train models.
Since then, the economics of AI have evolved quickly. Advances led by China’s DeepSeek have pushed down the perceived cost of training models, even as Nvidia continues to dominate advanced AI chips. Against this backdrop, India has built a government-subsidized framework under which data-centre operators provide graphic processing units (GPUs) as a service to startups through Mission support.
Sarvam became the first startup to receive access to the Mission’s shared compute infrastructure in April last year, followed by Soket AI Labs, Gan AI and Gnani, the latter focused on audio-first AI models. The selected companies represent some of the government’s earliest bets on building domestic AI capabilities.
Experts say the summit could offer these startups rare exposure to global partners and investors.
Kashyap Kompella, veteran AI analyst and founder of tech consultancy firm RPA2AI Research, said India’s key beneficiaries would be “private startups and enterprises who get access to global business partners and investors—and will get the kind of growth and networking opportunities that you don’t get otherwise in India.”
“Plus, the presence of the who’s-who of AI, after prime minister Modi’s speech at the AI Action Summit in France last year, is a clear sign of intent that India is an important market for startups, solidifying India’s push for AI leadership worldwide,” Kompella added.
In the latest tranche of approvals, BharatGen, incubated at the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, emerged as the first Indian entity to secure more than $100 million in a single AI funding round tied to the initiative. The company had previously received a $27 million grant under the Department of Science and Technology’s National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems (NM-ICPS).
The fresh funding is aimed at developing a general-purpose, trillion-parameter foundational large language model, cofounder Rishi Bal had told mint in September.
With the latest cohort finalized, these startups are expected to showcase their models during the summit. On 30 January, Union IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said Centre-backed firms would present “a bouquet of AI models” that users would be able to access across platforms.
Vaishnaw, however, had emphasized that India’s approach to AI will see the build-out of small models with purpose-driven data-sets.
Attention will now turn to how India’s AI showcase plays out — and how visiting delegations including OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind respond.
